Perhaps you could enlighten me....

  • Thread starter Thread starter squishy
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squishy

I have a client that has email hosting at 1 & 1 and using Outlook 2003 in
the office.

Every couple of months, one of their accounts will try and re-download all
of the emails on the server (sometimes THOUSANDS of emails). These emails
must be left on the server because they use blackberries with Outlook and
want these irritating little devices to be able to get their emails when not
in the office.

In my research of the events, there seems to be at least one corrupt email
on the server when this happens.

1 & 1 suggests changing over to IMAP instead of POP3 because the problem is
with POP3. But, I am not sure this is the issue. I have other clients
hosted elsewhere that never have this issue and also use POP3 with
blackberries and leave emails on their servers.

The tech at 1&1 told me just today that when their servers get overloaded,
the servers attempt to dump all of the emails to the clients. Problem is
that we have Outlook set to leave a copy on the server, and they say this is
why we get this re-sending of emails.

Their explanation really doesn't make sense though. Since all of their
email accounts are on the same email server, if the tech told me the truth,
it would seem that all of the employees would experience this problem at the
same time. They don't.

Every 30 to 60 days, it is a different employee that gets to re-download
thousands of emails, then run an add-in to delete all duplicate emails from
the inbox.

Any ideas? My solution (that I'm looking into right now) is to change email
hosts.

--
squishy

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,
in a state of civilization, it expects what never
was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson
 
You can't just let emails accumulate indefinitely on a POP server.
I'm sure there are limits, and even before the limit is reached,
performance would be compromised.

Gary VanderMolen
 
Thanks for your reply....

The upper limit of the mailbox is 2GB - she's not even at 1/10th of that
yet.

Performance is not an issue either - it re-downloads almost 1800 emails just
as fast as it downloads 2 emails (adjusting for the number of emails of
course).

The problem is Outlook re-downloads emails at what seems to be random times.

If she logs in via webmail it shows all emails as "read" except for those
she truly hasn't seen yet (maybe 5 emails when we looked). So the server
knows they have been read. Therefore, the problem must be with Outlook
2003.

I just love these types of problems...Microsoft blames the internet
connection or the servers and tells you to contact your email provider -
then the email provider blames Microsoft and Outlook.

What we need here is a way to make them feel our pain.

--
squishy

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,
in a state of civilization, it expects what never
was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson
 
I am not really helping you but I use to have a 1&1 pop account and would
periodically have the same problem that you described and tech support told
me the same types of explanations. After talking many times with tech
support, the person told me it has something to do with the way that there
server is set up and that the only real solution was to switch to IMAP. I
found another solution - switching ISPs. I have had a few ISPs since then
and my Outlook settings are the same as they were with 1&1 and have never
had the same problem with duplicate emails.
 
Yeah - I'm moving them to another provider. I have had the same problem 2
times with Brinkster in almost 4 years.

The odd thing is that it only affects 1 account at a time - not all of them.
So I don't think they are restoring anything to the email server.

They had a missing message that stopped Outlook and Thunderbird from
retrieving the emails. I wonder why email clients aren't smart enough to
just report any errors at the end of trying to retrieve them all?

Anyway, I wound up logging into her webmail client and manually deleting
over 1400 emails. Those 1&1 morons can't even delete emails from an
account.

That's just sad.

--
squishy

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,
in a state of civilization, it expects what never
was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson
 
squishy said:
Anyway, I wound up logging into her webmail client and manually deleting over 1400 emails. Those 1&1 morons can't even delete
emails from an account.

That's just sad.
Click to expand...

It's not that they don't know how, they don't want the liability, in case
the customer later says, "That's not what I asked you to do."
Deleting emails is not really a tech support function.
 
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